The bold idea award, named the Alexandre Dumas award in honor of the swashbuckling creator of such adventures creator of such adventures as "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers," is a large brass urn that will rotate from winner to winner. Anders, Melanie, Will and Mike will make the selection each month.
Month | Winner | |
August 1998 | James Shiffer and Chuck Liddy | |
July 1998 | Chris Hardesty | |
May 1998 | Peder Zane | |
April 1998 | Kate Anthony, Damon Cain, & Robin Johnston | |
March 1998 | Chuck Small | |
February 1998 | Jemele Hill and Corey Lowenstein | |
December 1997 | Dan Gearino | |
November 1997 | Joe Dew | |
October 1997 | Karen Hughes | |
September 1997 | Martha Quillin | |
August 1997 | Maile Carpenter | |
July 1997 | Michele Kurtz | |
June 1997 | Corey Lowenstein |
THE BOLD IDEA award goes to James Shiffer and Chuck Liddy for their fabulous work doing The River Chronicles.
The idea to do this actually started percolating last spring. No one agrees anymore on how this idea got launched, but the way I remember it, James and I started talking about it awhile ago, but then we decided no one would ever let us do this. Then I go to this meeting in May, and the room is filled with a bunch of pretty bored editors thinking about the long summer ahead. So Pat, who by this time has been an editor for about a day, says let's do an adventure series. Then he launches into this long story about how when he worked in Charlotte, he was sent into the forest to do an adventure series for a whole week, with no food, and no tent. All he had was 10 matches, a knife, a canteen of water, a snake bite kit, and a book called "Living off the Country." He lost 18 pounds.
The logo was, and I kid you not, it was 1969, the logo was Babe in the Woods.
So everyone in the meeting gets very excited and they bat around several possibilities. And i come back upstairs and I tell Shiffer, you know that crazy idea of yours to canoe the Neuse? Well, maybe you can. So that's how the series got started.
Then we had to find a photographer. I called Gene. Gene says it's got to be Chuck Liddy. I'm thinking the odd couple, could work.
This is what Gene said: "Chuck goes home every day from work and works out. He's got this boxing thing, this treadmill, he does all these exercises. That's how he takes his tension out."
"And he calls me. About everyday. He calls me while he's doing his exercises and tells me how good it feels."
"I knew I needed to assign it to someone who could sit in the back of the canoe and help the reporter. And Chuck was the only one in good enough shape to do it, on my staff."
Gene pauses a minute and then he says: "I needed someone who could carry more than his weight."
So then Chuck and James really get going. James does about three weeks worth of research, and Chuck takes care of getting the canoe, the gear, all the water-proofing stuff etc. It was quite a logistical feat. But it was also a very BOLD undertaking.
Because even when you look at Chuck or James, even though you're probably thinking, these guys are two total outdoorsmen, macho even, the real truth is that for days before they left all they would talk about is the snakes. Copperheads. They told me that they were told that the copperheads would jump from tree limbs into the canoe while they were paddling by. I'm like, give me a break. They're dead serious. So James buys himself a machete. Then when Chuck finds out about James' machete, he needs to have a machete also. So now there are two machetes in the canoe. And of course, the first snake they ever see is in a cage.
The point, however, is that it was not just a bold idea. It was a story very boldly undertaken, and boldly told. Readers loved it, the river guys were in the papers, and on TV, and on the radio. People waited for them on the river, Kinston parks and recreation dept. hung a banner over the river telling them to stop and then they had a pig pickin for them. In New Bern, the Neuse River Foundation folks greeted them with a regatta of 20 boats, and they almost capsized in the wakes. And that was about the time that Chuck hit Shiffer in the head with his paddle, which didn't go over very well.
And I'm sitting at my desk editing the latest installment and reading all this and thinking, thank God the machetes weren't around.
So, to Chuck and James, congratulations. To some people, you're the river guys. To me, you're two babes in a canoe.
This month's Dumas award for bold ideas is presented to Chris Hardesty. Chris demonstrated his aptitude for bold ideas in researching and telling the story of Lucille Rebecca Alexander, whose remains were found in a small Durham house approximately 10 years after her death.
Research is much more than databases, computers and online searching. Research is knowing all the places to look for the information you need and knowing more than one route for finding that information. What's more, research is an attitude!
Chris's natural curiousity and persistance, combined with his research and gumshoe skills, helped shed light on Alexander's life. With what seemed to be almost no information to go on, Chris discovered incredible details about this woman. Sifting through the waist high debris of Alexander's home with Amanda Garrett, Chris found leads to pursue. He used everything from simple print resources like city directories to the full range of our online people tracking tools.
We're pleased to present the Bold Idea Award to Chris and to make the cup special, we've included a two hour supply of diet coke, a four hour supply of cigarettes, a home-made gift certificate to burger hut, and a skull to remind him of a great story -- "bones."
Among the many accomplishments of Peder Zane are:
First, for seizing upon the idea of short fiction as unique and valuable and then shepherding it into reality in the form of our new Sunday Reader feature.
And second, for coming up with the idea of having weekly book sales that not only clear the department of a mountain of books but also raise a few bucks for local causes. And satisfy the ethics policy, to boot.
There's a popular line frequently quoted, and it goes like this: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
That is the conventional wisdom but there's lots of unconventional wisdom at the N&O so sometimes we do unconventional things. Our newspaper ain't broken but we set out to fix it.
Backed by one helluva team of folks, Kate Anthony, Damon Cain and Robin Johnston set out to do the impossible.
Changing an already good-looking newspaper into an even better looking newspaper under tremendous pressure of an April 19th deadline, this threesome led a host of others through the process of updating our masthead, our section flags, our page folios, our stock pages and, of course, the now-famous column photo sigs.
Perhaps you don't understand the volume of work involved. Let me help you.
With daily and nightly section deadlines that did not disappear, this team worked:
The newspaper's design speaks volumes to readers. Before they look at a photo, read a headline or dive into a story, a page design grabs a reader or it doesn't.
Our updated design is sure to grab more readers more often.
Join me in congratulating Kate, Damon and Robin as they represent a host of others who made Phase One of our design update a success.
In his tenure at The News & Observer, Chuck has consistently worked to improve the paper's relationship with young readers. He helped start Nando.next for high school journalists, several of whom are now pursuing college journalism degrees and one of whom is working part-time on the copy and design desks. Chuck also helps with Newspapers In Education, the Horizons page and the weekly Schools page. But the culmination of his work with teenagers was the Journalism Day conference held at UNC on March 8.
Chuck did much of the legwork to bring the conference together, often giving much of his free time. It's not unusual for Chuck to work late on Friday night editing weekend copy, then turn around and attend an early Saturday meeting of young journalists. (And believe me, for a copy editor to get up early on a Saturday morning takes true dedication.
These days, there's a lot of handwringing among newspapers about reaching the younger audience, trying to get them hooked on newspapers and laying the groundwork for a new generation of readers. Chuck is not just talking about it. He's going out, spending a lot of his own time, for the betterment of the entire newsroom.
Karen Hughes had the bold idea to get a head start on a project and the even bolder idea to get departments throughout the company to work together on it.
The result is the Ski Package that will begin publication December 7.
The project began as the annual special travel section on skiing, complete with a graphic pointing out the location of ski resorts in our area. But as usual, Karen saw that it could be much more. She met with Joe Miller and David Alff to discuss the possibilities. Of course, the graphic could be turned into a poster for IQ to market. Grey Blackwell and Margaret Baxter took care of that.
But why stop there? Karen enlisted the help of Renee Bollten in News Research to contact each of the resorts from Maryland to Alabama and pull together everything you could ever want to know about skiing there: location, 800 number, website, hours and rates, types of slopes, lessons, equipment rentals, whether they have ice skating or snowboarding or dirt skiing, what kinds of restaurants and bars you'll find there, everything.
And as long as we've got that information, why not make it searchable? The next thing we knew, she had pulled in Richard Gay, the newest member of the new media staff to put the whole thing up on the web.
Karen always has her eyes open toward advertising and promoting IQ products, so she has already arranged for house ads to run the past two weeks promoting the section and including a coupon to pre-order the poster! These were scheduled to coincide nicely with the ski expo held in RTP last weekend. She also saw to it that rack cards will appear beginning November 26 and running through December 8. She worked with Display Advertising early on so that they were able to sell space for the travel section as a package deal with the poster. And later in the year, once ski season is in full force, you will see the poster as an incentive offered to new subscribers by our Circulation department. It will also be on display in customer services for folks to purchase on the spot.
In an environment where so often all of our attention and energies are on the next step in front of us and on our one little piece of the puzzle, the results of really looking around and considering the possibilities (and a willingness to be kicked out of the graphics department once in a while) are the key to Karen's success.
Michele Kurtz gets the bold idea award, but with a twist: for BOLDLY going where no one -- expecially the Durham school board -- wanted her to go -- their retreat in the mountains near Grassy Creek.
They tried everything to keep her out. They booked all the rooms in a bed and breakfast; the entire facility had a single phone and they unsuccesfully pleaded for her to give them some privacy so they could work out their much publicized differences. But Michele persisted.
When asked not to report, she cried Back off!
When requested to leave them alone, Oh no!, she said.
When asked to give them some space, Like Hell I will, she cried.
The superintendent even offered her a job, Don't bet on it, she said.